Perhaps it’s the writer in me, but I tend to take copious notes regarding the myriad things going on in life, constantly scribbling down items such as my daily Apress activities and tasks, reminders regarding books and articles I’m working on, and various hobbies.

To that end, over the years I’ve experimented with practically every solution under the sun, including Word, text files, and a blog. However, as each of these solutions have their unique drawbacks, about two years ago I began using a wiki and never looked back.

While the wiki is perhaps best known for its use in powering Wikipedia, the huge community encyclopedia. Wikipedia is powered by a LAMP stack running the Mediawiki wiki. In fact, until recently I exclusively used Mediawiki for my personal wiki solution, can vouch for its high quality.

However, for a personal and even most low-traffic wiki solutions, using a database seems a bit overkill. Indeed, MySQL is a very lightweight, low maintenance database solution, but it’s just one more service I need to constantly run in order to take advantage of Mediawiki. Accordingly, I recently began searching for a wiki solution which doesn’t require any database, and was surprised to learn quite a few exist:

DokuWiki: I ultimately settled upon this PHP-powered wiki. It was an absolute breeze to install, and I’ve already managed to move over all of my existing material, not to mention have started an entirely new wiki devoted to my new toy, the Nikon D80 (which I hope to be making public soon).

MoinMoin: A Python-powered wiki engine.

PmWiki: A PHP-powered wiki engine.

TiddlyWiki: This interesting implementation relies upon no server-side technology; rather it’s driven entirely by HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Jason